


It Serves Me Right to Suffer

by bamboozledone



Series: Me And The Devil Blues [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-30
Updated: 2012-08-30
Packaged: 2017-11-13 04:23:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/499438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bamboozledone/pseuds/bamboozledone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek learns to sing before he learns to walk. Or: Derek Hale plays the blues. Because let's be honest, he totally does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Serves Me Right to Suffer

**Author's Note:**

> How I got involved in this fandom is beyond me. Wow.
> 
> Apologies for my flagrant abuse of the California Probate Code and general fuckery with the whole 'Teen Wolf' universe including, but not limited to, pretty much ignoring the entirety of Season 2. Whoops? 
> 
> Title is from the John Lee Hooker song of the same name.
> 
> Mistakes are my own.

Derek learns to sing before he learns to walk.

 

This is what his mother tells him when he turns seven and picks up his first guitar, something shoddy and second-hand, like most things in his early life. The fretboard is a little worn down and Derek, despite being preternaturally gifted in the motor skills department, still has trouble picking the strings when he fiddles with it during the late hours of the night.

 

“Don’t worry, baby,” his mother had cooed, placing her warm fingers over his on the E minor chord. “Practice makes perfect.”

 

\---

 

Laura likes the absolute worst kind of country music: Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Patsy Cline are her heroes, and if you say anything about remotely negative about them, she’ll probably bite you. She sings a Dolly Parton song for a school talent show when she’s ten, and Derek puts his hands over his ears and his father gives him this look that means that Derek is going to need to lie about how much he liked it when Laura gets home.

 

\---

 

Derek is a very sickly child. It’s incredibly rare in genetic werewolf lines, but Derek spends his childhood a mess of tired limbs and sour stomachs and sleepless nights. His parents make phone calls to every specialist they can find on the subject, and while they all agree that it’s something that he will eventually grow out of, Derek, for now, needs every protection afforded to normal children in his position.

 

“You’ll grow up strong, just like your mother,” his father tells him over and over while Derek watches the rest of his family pack for the trips that he isn’t allowed to go on. “You just have to wait a little while, son.”

 

It’s not a problem for Derek to be alone, once he gets used to it. Laura gets lessons on control and combat and gets tan in the warm California sunlight and Derek’s mom signs him up for music lessons with an old man who has pictures of Stevie Ray Vaughn in his living room and Derek remains pale under perfectly pressed khaki pants. It doesn’t bother him, being by himself, because he has a beautiful new guitar and the pads of his fingers have finally callused over and he knows the collected works of W.C. Handy like the back of his hand.

 

\---

 

He likes Muddy Waters for happy days, John Lee Hooker for the sad ones, and Robert Johnson for everything in between.

 

\---

 

He’s eleven years old and obsessed with Bessie Smith and the sound of Fenders and Gibsons against glass and metal. Christmas has come and gone, and he’s been alone for what seems like weeks while the rest of the Hales do something back East, but his mother comes home before New Years and brings a big package wrapped in bright red paper with a blue bow on top.

 

“What’s that?” Derek asks when she puts it on the kitchen table.

 

“It’s for you,” his mother says, smiling as he looks with curiosity at the package. “Open it up!”

 

Derek gazes at the way the wrapping paper shimmers in the low light of the setting evening. “But Christmas is already over. And you and dad gave me lots of presents already.”

 

His mother laughs, and pushes the box toward him. “I didn’t buy this for you as a Christmas present, Derek. I bought it for you because I want you to know how much I love you.”

 

When Derek opens it, it’s a record player, matted by years and years of disuse. His mother shows him how to put a record on, warns him against scratching the vinyl when he presses down too hard.  They listen to Nina Simone’s voice, husky and dark, until Derek falls asleep against his mother’s shoulder.

 

\---

 

Laura and Derek find some common musical ground on Bonnie Raitt, but it’s a tentative agreement at best.

 

\---

 

When Derek turns twelve years old, his father gives him two presents: One is a book that has complicated drawings of their supernatural lineage, dating back hundred and hundreds of years to when their line sprawled across the Spanish mountains, and the second is a thick glass vial of powdered wolfsbane that makes Derek’s eyes itch and water.

 

By now, Derek’s health concerns have ebbed to manageable levels. He still can’t run as fast and jump as high as Laura, but he’s slowly working his way toward werewolf normalcy, sprinting in the bright light of the full moon and learning how to control the flashing of his eyes when he’s upset.  

 

“These things are meant to remind you of where you come from,” his father says, patting Derek on the back. “Be proud of who you are.”

 

Derek plays less for the next few months, and misses the steady weight of the guitar strap across his shoulder blade.  
  


\---

 

Derek knows that he’s not the favored one in the family. Despite his father’s every verbal effort to assuage him from feeling like he’s any less than the many children who scamper around the Hale household, Derek sees the pained expression on his face whenever Derek asks to be excused from a pack meeting so he can fiddle around on his guitar.

 

“It’s like he doesn’t even care,” he hears his father say one night, as Derek finishes brushing his teeth. “I can’t work with that. He’s going to get himself killed if he doesn’t start paying attention.”

 

His mother finds him on his bed, hot tears trailing down his cheeks. “Oh Derek,” his mother murmurs. “You know your father doesn’t mean the things he says.”

 

Derek grimaces. “Yes, he does.”

 

She wraps her arms around him, and Derek breathes her scent in. “Baby, you’re going to change the _world_ ,” she promises. “Just because your father doesn’t see that right now doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

 

\---

 

 

The house burns.

 

Derek had slung his guitar case over his shoulder that morning, thinking he might play something sweet and soft for Kate when he saw her that afternoon. It becomes the only thing he can keep from the life he and Laura leave behind.

 

\---

 

He’s seventeen and Laura is working part-time at a drug store while Derek tries to finish high school via mail. They’re barely making it by on the monthly payments that the lawyer keeps promising will get bigger in the future, once this whole case is closed and the life insurance company can no longer claim that there’s a dispute as to whether foul play was involved.

 

“Oh Derek,” Laura says one night, as he picks his way through the Johnny Winter songbook. He doesn’t like the way the sound resonates against the brick walls in the filthy apartment, the only place they could afford in Manhattan. “Girls don’t want to listen you sing the blues, they want to hear crappy acoustic covers they can make out to.”

 

Derek laughs, a short, abrupt sound, and feels the A string bend under the pressure of his finger.

 

\---

 

Kate liked rock music from the eighties. She had a particular thing for Hair Bands, and she would sing along to the radio constantly whenever they weren’t fucking or drinking. Derek remembers her going down on him once after she put on a Poison album, and, to this day, Derek will never be able to hear _Every Rose Has Its Thorn_ without getting a little bit aroused and a lot pissed off.

 

Kate was an awful singer. Derek put up with it back then, but now he wishes he had said something about it.

 

\---

 

He comes back to the apartment one morning when he’s eighteen, shitfaced and stoned and ready to rip something to shreds just because he can. He tries to be quiet, he really, _really_ does, but he steps on something that Laura dropped in the middle of the room, and curses as he feels his skin open up against a sharp metallic tip.

 

“Fuck,” he mutters as he hears Laura stir from inside her room. “ _Fuck_.”

 

Laura emerges, her hair pulled away from her face. Her threadbare pajamas trail on the ground as she walks over to him. He can hear her heart racing in the back of his head, her pulse erratic as she sees the blood seeing from the gash on his foot.

 

“Damn it,” she swears as she kneels down on the ground. “What the hell were you thinking?”

 

Derek moans, trying not to vomit on the floor.

 

“You can’t do this anymore,” Laura says as drags him to the sofa. His face is too warm against the cool pillows. “You’re better than this.”

 

“Am I?” he mutters, his voice barely a whisper above the sound of the air conditioner. “I almost lost it tonight, Laura. Claws and all. Just because she _looked_ like her.”

 

“Oh god, Derek. This is bad,” Laura whispers, her fingers ghosting over a cut on his forehead.

 

“She won’t file a police report,” Derek cuts her off. “She was too messed up to know what my face looked like for more than a few seconds.”

 

Laura doesn’t say anything, just strokes the hair next to his temple and kisses the top of his head like their mother used to do when he was nine years old and bruised from falling down the stairs.

 

“I already lost my parents. Don’t let me lose you too.”

 

Derek leaves in the morning, drives until he can’t see the cloud of smog from the city limits.

 

\---

 

He spends two years alone on the road, slumming it in whatever motel he can afford with the menial money he makes doing moderately to entirely humiliating odd jobs. The insurance payments have stopped altogether and he takes the liberty of firing the last lawyer in the long line of paid legal help who sits on his hands while the insurance company continues to insinuate that Laura had some knowledge of what happened to the rest of the Hale family.

 

Derek plays a couple gigs, just hired help, for stringy twenty-somethings who all want to be the next goddamn John Mayer. It’s not something he really enjoys (the stage lights sting his eyes and he hates the smell of clove cigarettes and cheap beer), but there’s a freedom he gets from leaning back as his hands work the strings of his guitar. He likes letting go for an audience, and the money they thrust in his hands isn’t too shabby either.

 

\---

 

He gets P.O. Box in Tulsa and makes sure to come back every month or so, just to see the empty window staring back at him.

 

\---

 

The probate of the Hale family will finally finishes on a cold Friday when Derek is twenty-two and hasn’t slept for more than six hours since he was nineteen. The house (the property it sits on, really) is Laura’s, as are all the remaining Hale assets, which are far and few between. The judge, on advice from the Sheriff’s department, makes a finding that the fire was not induced by any beneficiary to the life insurance claim, which means that they are both due a sizeable settlement from the insurance company.

 

Derek sits behind a wooden table in the courtroom, his hands folded and his head down as the judge continues. He’s wearing the only suit he owns, an ill-fitting grey thing that pinches him around the waist and flops beyond the length of his fingertips. Laura sits besides him in a pink dress and flat shoes, her hands fisting in the fabric of her sweater. They don’t speak, and when the judge asks if they have any further questions as to the judgment rendered, they both shake their heads and exit the room without a word.

 

\---

 

When he makes it back to Tulsa again, six months later, there’s a single, off-white envelope waiting in his P.O. Box. It’s a cashier’s check, grey and impersonal, and has a number written on it that assures Derek that he won’t ever need to stay in a shady motel again.

 

He spends a small fraction of the settlement money on a car, a Camaro that he doesn’t particularly even like. It’s sleek and black and the red-haired saleswoman who points it out slips her number into his back pocket, sliding her hand across his ass and gripping when he asks about the mileage it gets on unpaved roads. He drives the car off the lot an hour later, leaving the saleswoman and her number behind.

 

He puts the rest in a bank account under the name Miguel Perriera, and promises himself that he won’t touch it again unless absolutely necessary.

 

\---

 

After Laura dies, he collects her things from her little apartment, some shithole right outside the Los Angeles city limits that she’s probably overpaying for. Most of it is crappy stuff she probably picked up from the 99 cents store, and the furniture is clearly thrice-removed Craigslist in origin. Derek will probably trash the bulk of it, and burn the rest.

 

He finds her album collection in her bedroom, in the back of a shallow closet. He fingers the collection softly, can smell Laura’s scent lingering between the cardboard covers and the vinyl albums. She’s added substantially to it over the years, Loretta Lynn being placed aside Foreigner and AC/DC and, much to Derek’s chagrin, Journey’s _Greatest Hits_. He laughs when he sees a copy of a DeBarge record, and nearly loses it when he sees Johnny Cash’s face peeking out from the corner, partially obscured by a thick black sweater.  

 

He frames a couple of the albums and puts them in an airtight storage container in San Diego that he knows he’ll never visit. He gives the rest to Goodwill, feeling his stomach tighten when he sees Kitty Wells smiling from the front of a cover, and remembers Laura dressing up in a cowboy hat and pink cowboy boots for Halloween when she was six.

 

\---

 

He remembers the last time he saw Laura, beautiful and whole:

 

They met in Memphis because she was in town for the summer working as a tour guide at Graceland and Derek was in New Orleans for a month or two doing sessions work for some old timers he met in New York. They hadn’t spoken for months beforehand, but one day Laura’s number had popped up on his phone and Derek had, for once, picked up.

 

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Derek had said when he entered her dilapidated apartment, laughing and touching the stained material of her couch. He wonders what she’s been doing with the insurance money, if she’s also placed it away, never to be touched again.

 

They spoke for hours in hushed tones that night. Laura told him that she was finally seeing somebody, a guy who owned a little flower shop downtown and had blonde hair and an easy smile. Derek told her that he finally finished his GED courses (a lie) and about the Camaro. They laughed when they realized they were both living in San Francisco last May, and then they didn’t laugh at all.

 

“I missed you,” he had said later, when she touched his hand, felt the smooth tips of her fingers against his skin. “I will always miss you.”

 

They had listened to the soft drone of Ray Charles on the radio and fell asleep on opposing sides of Laura’s bed.

 

\---

 

The return to Beacon Hills is not a choice, it’s a compulsion, and Derek resents it so badly that he feels it in his bones. A year passes before Derek realizes it’s come and gone, and Derek years to be back in New York, with a guitar and no money and freedom in the thinnest meaning of the word.

 

\---

 

Scott enjoys really, really terrible music. Like, the worst imaginable. Each and every awful band that puts out a free EP on iTunes somehow manages to worm its way onto Scott’s playlist.  Derek sometimes considers asking the kid if he’d submit to a simple auditory test because he’s pretty sure that, despite the heightened senses, Scott is actually entirely deaf, and that’s why he thinks the absolute shit he has on his iPod is God’s Gift to Human Ears.

 

“I love this one!” Scott shouts over the booming bass line of yet another heinous indie band mix tape. “It’s the kind of music that really speaks to me, you know? They speak _truth_.”

 

Derek considers throwing Scott into the steering wheel, but doesn’t feel like using the same move twice.

 

\---

 

It takes awhile, and some concessions that he never thought he’d make, but Derek rents a duplex on the edge of town, far away from the burned out ruins of the Hale house. There’s a charming little white fence and a couple of feral cats who stalk around the neighborhood like they own the place. Derek considers calling animal control when they go into heat during the early spring, but he restrains himself, blames the wolf inside for his overt aggression toward the felines.

 

His new home is quiet, almost depressingly so.

 

\---

 

Derek once has to suffer through Allison and Lydia talking about how very awesome Lady Gaga and Kelly Clarkson are when he’s hopped up on painkillers after getting shot ( _again_ , which, really, Derek can absolutely get behind strict gun control laws if they stop crazy vigilante hunters from buying in bulk). He seriously considers breaking the tentative peace he and the Argents have come to just for the pleasure of mauling both of the girls and effectively ending their truly horrifying debate as to whether _Bad Romance_ or _Since U Been Gone_ is the song that defines their generation.

 

Derek assumes they think he’s passed out when they begin this bit of the conversation:

 

“I lost my virginity to Kelly Clarkson,” Lydia says absently, running a nail file over her right index finger. “Seriously, it was awesome.”

 

“Scott and I had sex to Gaga once,” Allison counters with a gleam in her eye. “It was in the guy’s locker room, right after a game. He left the pads on and everything. Totally kinky, right?”

 

 _Yes_ , Derek thinks to himself. He is totally fine with breaking the peace.

 

\---

 

Derek flirts with the idea of perpetual unemployment, but eventually finds a gainful occupation in a county file room. He has to wear a collared shirt and suit pants, a far cry from the leather jacket and faded denim jeans that he leaves on the Camaro’s front seat. On the side he takes college courses in things that he’ll never use and thinks that Laura would be proud of him.

 

The bank account remains untouched.

 

\---

 

Derek has this really strong feeling that Jackson only listens to rap to improve his considerably lacking street cred. Every time he sees the kid he has a Jay-Z or Kanye West track playing in the background (and, god, if Jackson is going to worship at the altar of Hip-Hop, could he please try something that doesn’t reek of Top 40?), and nobody, absolutely nobody can stomach the refrain of _Hard-Knock Life_ that many times in a row without suffering some sort of severe nervous breakdown.

 

He picks Jackson up one time, and Derek swears he hears _Ziggy Stardust_ blaring through his window. Derek does a slight double take, and looks up before he puts his hand on the horn and honks in quick, sharp intervals. A figure in the upstairs bedroom looks around, clearly distracted, and Derek can’t help but chuckle when he picks up on Jackson’s stressed out scent in the air.

 

“Bowie?” Derek asks when Jackson finally slides into the car beside him. Jackson flushes and mutters something totally incomprehensible in his defense. Derek chooses not to press the matter.

 

\----

 

Derek totals the Camaro.

 

Ironically, it’s not his terrible driving that sends the car flying over a center divide, it’s some deer that comes from out of the fucking middle of nowhere and skips across the road like there aren’t a thousand cars coming at a breakneck pace for it. So Derek, who is in the process of flagrantly violating California’s laws against texting while driving, swerves half a second too late, and hears the airbags deploy just as the front of his car crunches into the white cement of the divider.

 

Not much can actually kill Derek, he knows that. But he sees orange fire licking at the side of the car and he knows he’s broken at least seven bones all over his body, and he imagines that this is how it felt for his mother, when the Hale household went up in flames.

 

\---

 

Stiles is the one who takes him home from the hospital.

 

It’s only by coincidence that he’s there (at least that’s what Derek hears Stiles tell the Sheriff when they’re in the hall), and Mrs. McCall lectures both Stiles and Derek for what seems like hours about how to properly manage the eight breaks in Derek’s appendages before they are allowed to leave the hospital, Stiles pushing Derek in a squeaky wheelchair through the recovery ward.

 

“You obviously owe me one,” Stiles says as he opens the door for Derek, shoving the passenger seat back until it clicks. “Seriously, because if there’s one thing my dad just won’t tolerate, it’s bad driving. I have at least a forty-five minute lecture on the evils of texting while behind the wheel waiting for me when I get home.”

 

Derek snickers, feels the broken rib on his side give under the pressure of his breath. “I’m sure you’ll live.”

 

Stiles shrugs and pushes in a burned CD with the cryptic label NOT FOR DAD on it, and rolls down his window as the first few chords drift through the sound system.

 

Derek’s blood thrums through his veins, and he lets the fragile sound of the guitar fill his senses until he is lightheaded.

 

“Something wrong?” Stiles asks, turning the volume knob. It’s Robert Johnson, _Night on the Delta_ , the first song Derek learned to play when he was young. “You’re not going to pass out again, are you? Because I don’t think I’m medically equipped to deal with an unconscious werewolf at the moment.”

 

“No,” Derek says, and absolutely does not start to hum along to the rhythm guitar, low enough so Stiles can’t hear.

 

\---

 

He keeps a couple pictures of Laura around his house. On days when it’s hard to wake up, he speaks to a smiling image of his sister, tells her how much he misses her voice on the other end of a phone line.

 

\---

 

They’re sitting on the edge of the school’s parking lot, waiting for Scott and Jackson to show up with Lydia, when Stiles turns on his CD player again. This time it’s B.B. King, smooth and robust, blaring through the speakers. Derek can almost feel the guitar strings against his fingers, and counts off the rhythm in his head, his toes tapping involuntarily against the floor of the jeep.

 

“My mom liked him,” Stiles starts by way of unsolicited explanation. “She used to play _The Thrill is Gone_ when I was a kid instead of doing the whole lullaby routine.” He laughs to himself, pumps up the bass until it rattles through Derek’s bones. “She wasn’t much of a singer, so it was probably for the best.”

 

Stiles shifts against his seat and turns off the headlights. “My dad drinks too much when he hears it. Just goes right for the booze cabinet and doesn’t stop until he’s passed out on the couch.”

The image is one that Derek’s all too familiar with, too familiar with being, but before he can say so, he sees Scott pull up and flash his high beams twice.   

 

\---

 

It becomes a routine. Stiles putting on old blues albums whenever Derek is in the car, and tells Derek about what it was like when he was five and his mother would fall asleep in the living room while listening to old Sam Cooke songs on the radio. Derek never says it aloud, but it reminds him what it was like, when he and Laura were young and would sit around the record player his mom bought him, Laura clapping along while Derek tried picking the high riffs on a shitty Takamine.

 

\---

 

Derek had spent about a month of his life with steadily high blood alcohol content, wondering whether or not his family was taken from him as some sort of punishment for not listening to his father when he had the chance, for shirking off lessons about Hunters when he was fourteen and not realizing what Kate Argent was really doing when she wrapped her legs around him when he was fifteen and told him to fuck her harder, deeper. 

 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Laura had told him one morning, as he nursed a hangover with water and a bottle of Tylenol. She had left a bowl of warm oatmeal and a piece of toast on the table for him before she went to work.

 

\---

 

Stiles shows up, uninvited, exactly one year after Laura’s death.

 

It’s raining and Stiles is soaked because he’s seventeen and an idiot who doesn’t think about bringing an umbrella with him even though it’s been pouring for six days on end. Derek very seriously considers leaving him outside and claiming that it was a Teaching Moment at some later date, but Stiles is shivering and his bottom lip looks practically blue, so Derek opens the door, lets the kid drip all over the welcome mat he bought at a garage sale when he was twenty-one.  

 

“It figures you’d be the one,” Derek mutters as Stiles strips off his sweatshirt and wrings it out over the kitchen sink. Patsy Cline is drawling in the background, a slow murmur against the sound of the rain outside. Derek doesn’t bother trying to hide his breath, which is probably bordering on flammable at this point, when Stiles passes him.

 

“Go big or go home, right?” Stiles asks, pointing to the four bottles of liquor Derek has lined up on the side table. “Didn’t really peg you as a souse, Derek.”

 

“I had a problem with it a long time ago,” Derek says, settling on the couch. “I give myself a reprieve from sobriety once a year now."

 

“It’s your liver, man,” Stiles replies, and helps himself to the half-empty scotch bottle.

 

\---

 

Derek sold his first guitar when he moved back to Beacon Hills, after. The local pawn shop owner gave him this look like he knew just what it meant to Derek, and paid him at least twice what the worn wooden instrument was actually worth.

 

“You come back for it now, son,” he had said as Derek touched the handle on the shop’s door.

 

“I will,” Derek had lied.

 

\---

 

They’re sitting on the floor, and Stiles is just as much of a lightweight as Derek imagined he would be. He’s practically drooling as his head rolls to the side. Derek, who would normally push Stiles away, lets him stay pressed against his side, warm and wet.

 

“Why do you keep it?” Stiles asks quietly. “Why do you keep her stuff when it clearly fucks you up so much?”

 

“It’s a connection,” Derek says without thinking. “Sometimes I forget what she looks like, what she sounded like when she laughed or sang.” He takes a steadying breath, touches the carpet with a careful hand. “I don’t normally take her stuff out, but I don’t want to lose her again. I can't lose her again.”

 

“Yeah,” Stiles whispers, shifting on the floor next to him. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

 

The record player spins on, forgotten.

 

\---

 

Derek eventually goes back to the pawn shop. Stiles goes with him. 


End file.
